


learned it from watching you

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [123]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, i am too tired for more tags i will tag this later, martyrdom is a shared trait
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 20:44:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8592997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: "Besides, now the next time you try and convince me you're the worst person in the world I can point out you got hit by a car for some lady you don't even know. You can't tell me that doesn't count."





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.
> 
> Have I mentioned lately you are all lovely? you are all lovely. I totally did not mean for this to be ~15K I swear.

Steve gets about ten minutes' warning. 

In fact, what he gets is a text from Matías, which comes up on his phone's screen as _Matías (PR)_. Steve's not entirely sure why he felt the need to add the little qualifier. Maybe he'd just been distracted and hadn't bothered to think about how he'd be talking to the guy more than enough that he wouldn't need the reminder of who he is and why he's got Steve's personal cell number. 

(Steve finds it kinda unsettling to think of it as _personal_. But it kinda is. Someday his life might stop throwing stuff at him that makes him feel weird and off-balance, but apparently not any time soon.) 

He keeps meaning to take it off, and then not doing it. That happens a lot with stuff on the phone, Steve finds. It's why Elizabeth's in there as "Dr Ross" and Tony's in there as "Stark (Jr)", and so on. The number or address or whatever it is gets added one way that probably makes sense at least right at the time, but stops making sense later, and Steve means to fix it and somehow never gets around to it, so it never happens. 

It's probably a metaphor for life. 

(Steve's tired of metaphors for life.) 

He's irritable anyway, and for a moment it focuses on the stupid phone and his stupid contacts in the stupid phone and why he's never followed through on changing what he wants to change, and he swears he's gonna do it this time, after he reads this email. 

The bad mood was just kind of there when he woke up. It meant that this morning, Steve'd finished his run down at the Tower and then punched things in the optimized gym for a while, in hopes of working it off. It wasn't from anything - the only part of what he felt that had any weight was a kind of small knot of worry that the reason Bucky went out early and hadn't come back by the time Steve left to go try and burn off the crabbiness is that he sensed that crabbiness and it kept him away. 

It's not much of a worry, though: thing is, if Steve in a bad mood _is_ getting to Bucky he's actually more likely to _stay_ , either to verbally poke holes in Steve until Steve snaps and they either have a fight or Steve sort of works his way up to a fight and it ends up with him talking about whatever it is that's bugging him . . . or because it gets more important to be right there and watch every twitch Steve makes, in case - 

Well. The paranoia makes it more important to be there, and quiet. 

There isn't anything that's bugging him, this time. He's just snapping at everything, inside his head and then out loud. He almost tells someone off for not looking where they were going on the sidewalk, and he did end up shouting something at the back of a car that cut him off at a corner.

The run didn't do much. Neither did a run through the agility route, or even punching things. Steve can't even remember _why_ he'd snapped at Natasha when she came in. 

Because it's Tasha, all it got him was a look with faintly raised eyebrows and the remark, _Well_ somebody's _Captain Crankypants today_.

(It had occurred to Steve, despite the momentary flare of aggravation, that it was the first time someone'd actually called him something like that. When Bucky was giving him a hard time, it had a different shape. Different titles.) 

Steve figures there's a point in his life when that'd've ended in a fight, and that it's probably growth as a person that means he took a breath instead and retorted, _You know, the thing is - I'd snap at you more for that. But you'd just get . . . worse. More calm and reasonable, and it's really obnoxious and I know for a_ fact _that you can keep it up indefinitely. That's the problem with you._

_That is definitely a problem with me,_ Tasha'd replied, getting - as he'd predicted - all the more bland and calm and reasonable with her agreement. 

Well, mostly agreement. Steve did _notice_ the substitution of the indefinite for the definite when it came to the article in front of "problem". He was almost sour enough to agree there were a lot more, but checked himself. That was getting past a bad mood and into being an asshole. 

He is _trying_ not to be an asshole. In general. 

So instead Steve'd given her a Look, which she answered by lifting her eyebrows slightly _higher_ , silence persistent and expectant, and he'd tried not to sigh. Because he definitely recognized she was doing stuff to manage him, right now, but well - 

Knowing Tasha's managing you really doesn't do much to keep it from working, usually because if she was being open about it, she's being sensible and you're not. Not always. But often. And right now . . .well. So Steve'd had to try hard not to sigh. 

_Yes,_ he'd said. _I'm cranky. No, there's no important reason. I'm just cranky. It happens sometimes. I'm allowed. It's not a mystery, or some kind of puzzle, I'm just cranky. It doesn't need any kind of deep investigation. People get cranky. In this case, 'people' means me. So yeah, I'm cranky. That's all._

He'd heard the defensiveness and peevishness and all the rest. But it was still true. 

Tasha'd tilted her head slightly, eyebrows drawing together this time while still raised, so that her look just screamed "okay then". 

Then she said, sincerely, _You should go back to punching machines until you feel better. I remembered right, you're _way_ less fun when you're a grouch._ And he'd only thrown the water-bottle at her. 

It's kind of _like_ social skills. 

But the fact is, he _is_ just cranky, and there _isn't_ any important reason as far as he can see. Just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, maybe had bad dreams he doesn't remember, stubbed his toe on one of the dining-room chairs, doesn't like the weather - nothing important enough to track down exactly what it is that's got him out of sorts, and he did take a couple minutes to consider it. 

Tried not to take too _many_ minutes once he couldn't think of anything, even when he checks himself like that. 

( _You know it is possible to_ overanalyse your responses, Sam'd pointed out the last time they talked on the phone and Steve'd blown out a sigh. 

_Yeah, I know,_ he'd said, sourly. _Especially now._ And the sour had stuck, so he said, _You know, it's like you can't ever win. There's always something else. Here, know why you're doing everything and that means you've gotta examine all parts of your soul and psyche, but don't think about it_ too _much or you'll make yourself feel worse through overanalysis and that'll start being the problem._

_The path of virtue is as a razor's edge over . . . something or other,_ Sam'd said, solemnly. Steve'd rolled his eyes. 

_Shut up, Sam,_ he'd retorted. _That's not even a real proverb._ And Sam'd laughed.)

Steve had decided to things for a while longer, until he broke one of the machines. He'd stared at it, and then given it a kick, and gone to rinse off in the showers right there.

When he'd come back out, he managed a conversation with Tasha that didn't make him sound like a surly bear _or_ a sullen kid. Then Steve'd decided come home before his luck ran out - because if there is a platonic example of the kind of mood that means he should not share the same building as Tony (short of a world-ending crisis), it's this one. 

Genuinely pure and platonic. You could frame it. Take a photo, stick it in the dictionary. Or on Wikipedia. Whatever that metaphor is supposed to be nowadays. Sometimes he can't keep up with what he hasn't kept up with. 

The point is, him in this kinda mood, when it comes to Tony Stark - it's like expecting Abrikoska _not_ to chase a jingle ball. And Steve still hasn't actually punched him, even a few times he's really deserved it, and he'd still like to keep that record. Today might've put it at risk. 

About two thirds of the way through the subway ride, Tasha texts him a link that turns out to be to a video of someone's dog (looks like some kind of shepherd-cross-mutt) who does a Noble Captain America pose with his paw on a plush shield, and then alerts to different moments on one of the cartoons, and that kind of stuff. 

Steve has to admit it's a good video, and probably a pretty great dog. The cartoon still makes him cringe. 

He's not sure if _Tasha_ sending that kind of thing counts as an oblique apology, as her teasing him more, both, or neither. He's actually okay with the ambiguity by now, surprisingly. Steve's starting to get the feeling that sometimes, at least when she's got her guard down (as much as Tasha ever has her guard down), Natasha doesn't entirely know either. 

Elizabeth's also sent him one of the Instagram-share-email-things of one of Bucky's photos. It's her way around one of Steve's rigid rules: he does not, under any circumstances, even let it look like he _might_ be keeping an eye on anything Bucky's doing online, or any of the places he lurks. Or even looking there occasionally. At all. Ever. 

He's unbending about that one. There's about three of those places, if you stretch your definition of lurking - and Steve does. Sure, the Instagram account and the Tumblr account get posts, and technically as far as Steve understands it a _lurker_ is someone who never says anything, makes any kind of post or whatever, but Steve also doesn't think they count. 

On the Tumblr it's either either reposts of someone else's stuff, because that's how Tumblr apparently works, or it's pithy, usually totally opaque comments of less than a hundred and fifty words. On the Instagram there's pictures from his phone, without any kind of explanation except maybe in the tags (which are even more opaque than the pithy Tumblr comments), and he deletes comments that annoy him without notice. 

The third place is Reddit, and on Reddit Bucky never says anything. So it counts as lurking, because he's not interacting with anyone. He's watching them, seeing what they do. The slivers of content there aren't about them or for them, they're just . . . there. 

Steve's put all three places firmly off-limits. He only knows about the three because of other people telling him, of their own initiative - mostly Elizabeth, sometimes Natasha, sometimes Tony. Bucky's never mentioned them, never drawn attention to them, never given Steve the slightest indication he _wants_ Steve to pay attention to them, and the last thing Bucky needs - maybe actually even the absolute last - is the idea that Steve's watching _everything_ he ever does. 

That Steve feels the need to check up on him. 

The prohibition even extends to clicking on the links if someone sends them: there's just never going to be anything even in the browser history that implies he went there, even if Bucky ever feels compelled to check. And he might. So Steve's not gonna risk it. It's just a flat out _no_. 

Steve thought about nixing the share-emails too, but he thought about the whole thing for a while and decided that of all things, they didn't count. Steve never went to the site, he just opened an email he hadn't asked for. That wasn't Steve looking, that was Elizabeth being Elizabeth, finding ways to reach out and connect if she can. 

And she only did it with Instagram and even then only some of the photos, and the automatic share-emails put a copy of the picture right in the email (along with the tags) so Steve didn't have to visit the site or use the app. And it means he's usually forewarned about whatever Tony's going to end up sniggering about. That's kind of useful. 

Tony seems to think Bucky's internet habits are hilarious. Bucky doesn't seem to mind, so Steve leaves it alone. 

Elizabeth says she's pretty sure at least three of the regular trolls on the Instagram comments are actually Tony, including when they fight with each other, and she's probably right. Steve tells her it's better than making Skynet. Every time that exchange happens, it's even odds whether later that week he ends up with a text that says _STILL fuck you I would STILL never make Skynet_. 

(Sometimes he kinda thinks he and Tony are both making up for missed adolescence, but he's never said it out loud, because that'd be too embarrassing to live with.)

But honestly, Elizabeth sending the share-emails is a nice work-around sometimes, because Bucky's Instagram is actually reliably hilarious, and it means Steve doesn't miss _all_ of it. And sometimes with the cracks in the tags, he's the _only_ one who'd actually get it. Like this time. 

This time it's an angled picture of the rapidly growing seedlings in the laundry-room, with some kind of filter on it. Steve reads the tags and his mouth twitches - _#america's hobbies_ , but also _#america's future_ and _#america: possibly a housewife_ which is the kind of thing Steve would throw something at Bucky for if he were here. 

He should remember to ask Elizabeth or Tony if anyone they've seen has managed to come up with "this guy is just messing with us" as a theory yet, when it comes to explaining the tags. According to Tony more than once Bucky's spent a significant amount of time just about anywhere that isn't Brooklyn that's within a couple hours' ride either by his motorbike or by public transit - in other words, that Bucky can get to without seriously disrupting his own equilibrium - taking and posting pictures of things that make it very clear where he, and now there's an ongoing argument about where the mysterious Instagrammer actually is. 

Largest consensus appears to be Queens. It's hilarious. 

He resists the urge to text Bucky with _Housewives are STILL not the ONLY people who GARDEN, BUCKY_ , and then goes to find the little watering can, since he's been reminded and all. He cleans out the cat's box, too, while after ten minutes or so of him being home she gets down off her perch - the new one at the end of the entryway-hall, and Steve is not _exactly_ sure how he ended up getting her another one of those, but she seems to like it - and comes over to complain at him for not being Bucky. 

Steve's a bit more comfortable picking her up, these days. The thing with cats is they're so . . . rubbery, everything loose, all the joints fluid, he's never sure if he's going to accidentally squash something he shouldn't squash, or how you'd even tell. He doesn't have _much_ more experience with dogs small enough you can pick them up, but still: dogs are solid. You can feel the build and muscle, you can tell where to be careful, they're . . .well, solid. 

Steve has a lot of sympathy with the pictures that people caption "proof that cats are a liquid". They sure feel like it to him. 

After he picks her up, she grooms her shoulder, grooms his wrist, and then jumps down off his forearm onto the kitchen counter, because they've still completely failed to teach her to keep off it. Which is not that surprising, since they were both pretty terrible at even trying. When Steve says, "You know, you're not supposed to be up there," it's pretty much a pointless ritual and she goes to knock the salt mill over. 

That's when he gets Matías's text. When he opens it, thinking mostly about how he's never fixed his contacts, it takes him a couple of seconds to actually take it in. Then a small plaintive part of him wishes he hadn't. 

It reads, _You're about to get an email. Please read ASAP. **HOWEVER** PLEASE also read **ALL CONTENTS** of the email BEFORE panicking._

And that is never the kind of thing you want to read. It's the kind of thing that can't _help_ but make you think the worst, preemptively. So Steve's actually wary as he opens the email. 

It's a copy of a news story. With a link. And as Steve reads the text on the screen a distant detached part of him wants to tell Matías that when it comes to telling Steve not to panic - well that's honestly, literally, completely and 100% asking the impossible, and he should revise his request to something easier, like walking on water or raising the dead. 

Or maybe _not acting_ on the panic until he's read the whole email. That might be doable. Steve can probably handle that. Not panicking, though, not feeling and being at least for a second fully and totally gripped by that panic: no. 

The headline's pretty innocuous: _WOMAN CREDITS GUARDIAN ANGEL AFTER BRUSH WITH DEATH_. Which people more or less always do, because - well it's just something people do. Jesus, God, a saint, angels or whatever. Gods-plural, spirits. 

(Steve suddenly wonders what Buddhists credit for near-death escapes, but the thought shreds itself against what comes next and he never remembers to find out). 

So the headline's not that alarming. You have to get into the article by at least a couple sentences before you find the lede buried amongst the establishing facts (where, who, what - ) and find out by "guardian angel" she means the guy she swears pushed her out of the way and then stopped the car with one hand. 

That's where the panic starts. And it's a good strong start, washing over him like a wave of slush from a passing car and just as cold. 

Fortunately, Steve has a sudden moment of genius, maybe even made possible by how much adrenaline and God-knows-what-else just got dumped into his bloodstream, and that moment of genius is a single thought. It seems weirdly slow and viscous as thoughts go, running through his head, but it's still brilliant and probably doesn't take as long as it feels like when he remembers it later. 

He suddenly thinks that since Matías wanted him to wait until the end of the email to panic, that means there's something important there, something that . . . changes things, maybe. So maybe he should just skip right to the end, and read that, and if whatever he reads doesn't make sense then he can go and fill in the middle. 

And then maybe he'll stop feeling like he's in a cold sweat. He flicks past the rest of the words, all in the kind of share email Elizabeth sent except from a news site, and looks for that end Matías wanted him to wait for. 

Turns out that's a note, appended _by_ Matías, and it reads: 

_To recap, known facts are ONLY:  
\- lady driving the car was dangerously drunk and driving too fast because she was mad at her ex  
\- pedestrian was checking the time on her phone and didn't see the car coming  
\- pedestrian says she felt someone shove her out of the way and ended up rolling across the ground a couple yards away and getting skinned knees and hands  
\- there was Horrible Crashing Sounds™  
\- the car ended up on its side half on the sidewalk with its front smashed in like it hit something pretty durable, kind of near a lamp-post, more or less  
\- lady driving the car had a couple bumps and bruises plus some whiplash and swore a guy jumped in front of the car and shoved it over  
\- lady driving the car was, let it be repeated, really DRUNK  
\- pedestrian says there had been a guy standing by the corner store before she stepped into the road and when she got up there wasn't, and one other person inside the corner store says he thinks he did see a guy but he couldn't pick him out of a photo lineup  
\- this was fairly early this morning  
\- we got this heads up because the reporter called to see if Mr Stark was doing some random volunteer street patrolling (official statement: "Well it sure wasn't me. I wish it had been me. I was in a meeting. This would have been a lot more fun, and we all need to get hit by more cars, right?")   
\- Ms Hill's already checked any chatter anywhere else, and hospitals, and so on, and there's none  
\- **that's it** _

And then a bit about wanting to make sure Steve was informed _before_ he maybe checked the actual news sites or turned on the TV, since Matías felt fairly certain it would cause Steve a certain amount of concern and wanted to make sure the relevant facts were highlighted, something which news stories are often very bad at doing. And it might end up on local news even though nobody was horribly injured or killed, and even though there were only about five people involved total, including witnesses, as a sort of "on the lighter side". And obviously if they heard anything else Steve'd be the first to hear from _them_. 

To be fair, it does take care of about . . . 75% of the panic. All the panic that had most of its source in big picture things, like the fact that while Steve knows that all the . . . well _issues_ around Bucky being here, at all, and all the baggage behind them, they're going to have to come to a head at some point, he's still firmly in just thinking _but not yet, okay? Please God, not just yet._ Because if it happens it's all going to be crisis management he can't plan for until they find out which way it's going to explode, so that's all he's got. 

That part does sort of ebb. 

The 25% left, though, is still more than enough to make Steve _dizzy_ , because that remaining quarter of the panic goes _Jesus fucking Christ Bucky you just got hit by a car where in the name of_ God _-damned_ fucking _Hell_ are _you?_

Okay, so Steve's logic shoves its way in without any delay at all, pointing out that Bucky was clearly able to vacate the scene, _fast_ and without even leaving any blood behind, which as far as evidence goes argues _against_ any major or incapacitating injuries (probably, anyway, even if it were blunt-force born internal damage, that slows you _down_ and he was basically gone, right, before the pedestrian even got herself up off the pavement) but . . . that's still only so much help. 

And "so much" isn't really that much. It really isn't. 

It probably takes about as much self-control as Steve's ever had to lean on _not_ to call JARVIS and get him to locate Bucky's cellphone or hack every camera in the city until he can tell Steve where Bucky is. Steve's pretty damn sure not only could JARVIS do that, but that it'd be child's play and take about five minutes. So Steve could ask him. He _could_. 

But Steve doesn't do it. 

Because he is _not going to start that_. There is no God-damned way he is going to start that. Not for anything short of real, sheer necessity and no, damn it Rogers, at this point, this doesn't _count_. That is a very ugly, very short slippery slope and he's not fucking _going_ there. Everything that has any kind of damn logic in him knows this is _not_ necessity, that the overwhelming likelihood is that everything is going to be fine even if he doesn't do anything but sit here and wait, and if he were to stoop that God-damned low for his own peace of mind - 

So he doesn't do it. Because he's got that much self-control, and if he didn't he wouldn't deserve - 

If he didn't it'd be a problem. 

He just texts Matías back with _thanks, keep me posted if there's anything relevant_ and makes a new pot of fucking coffee. 

 

About ten minutes later, Steve realizes he owes Matías some kind of . . . fruit-basket, or something (what do people even do, these days?) because when all is said and done Steve is much, much better off with those ten minutes of warning than he'd've been without. They're miserable, tense, angry minutes - angry in that special way that you're only angry because you've got some kind of intense emotion you don't know what else to do with - and they're anything but fun, but still: it's better. It's much, much better. 

Bucky doesn't come in the front door, or even the balcony - it's a very, _very_ faint _click_ from down the hall that makes Steve stop, looks over to see the kitten's head jerk up like it's on a string, and then tries not to step on her on the way to . . . not, it turns out, their bedroom. The other bedroom. Bucky's room. 

The click was the window-latch, and the look Bucky turns on Steve starts out at an almost blind, bewildered animal panic - and then pretty quickly turns into just _totally_ bewildered, not- _quite_ -animal something-like-panic. 

And Steve could absolutely have been caught by this without having a single fucking idea what was going on and Jesus Christ, yes, that would have been worse. 

Actually that's . . . kinda true just overall. 

To start with, Bucky looks like Hell, but Steve has to admit he _doesn't_ really look like someone who just got hit by a car going more than 30MPH. Maybe like someone who rolled down a rocky hill - he's covered with patches of dirt and what would be dirt except for mixing with blood to make mud, but even that blood's all from just . . .patches of torn up skin, all shallow surface bits ripped off. Like skinning your knee except not just your knee. 

And okay Bucky can and when he's like this he probably _would_ ignore any injury he can, which means Steve can't rule out stable fractures and stuff like that. But dislocation and compound fractures and bones actually out of place would show, if only in how he moves, and it doesn't. Damage to internal organs would affect that, too, and there's no sign of it. 

In fact Bucky finishes dropping from window to bed to standing on the floor with the only thing Steve can see that's a problem being how it looks like Steve finding him right now's just about giving Bucky a panic attack. 

That mostly means Steve's got to be more careful, and move slower, than he wants to. But that's life. Not even a metaphor for life, just . . .life. 

When Bucky doesn't pick her up right away, the kitten makes a weird double-tone sound of protest, and gets halfway through going to put her forepaws on his leg when Bucky . . . doesn't quite jerk back, but definitely seems like he's going to. He stares at her like he can't even figure out what the Hell she _is_ , let alone why she's got her head pointed at him, meowing and complaining. 

That, Steve thinks, isn't a good sign. 

"Hey," Steve says, stopping in the doorway, leaning on the frame. "You okay?" 

It's a completely damn stupid question, in and of itself, but the asking's not really about . . . the content of the answer, the yes or no. Steve knows the answer is _no_. Things that live under rocks and eat maggots could figure out the answer is _no_. That's no kind of mystery.

But it's a question that's probably not gonna make anything worse - if Bucky's actually doing better than Steve thinks, it's not gonna hit the buttons that make Bucky think Steve thinks he's . . . all kinds of vicious shit Bucky calls himself in his own head. It'll either just be a question to answer, or at most it'll make Bucky cranky and he'll snap at Steve for asking it. 

And if he's not doing any better than Steve thinks, it's innocuous enough that it's just going to make no sense, it's not gonna set off any alarms all by itself. 

Watching Bucky's face, and the faint changes that maybe most people wouldn't see as any different from _blank_ , Steve ends up pretty damn sure it makes no sense. And when Bucky doesn't actually manage an answer, when his gaze keeps moving from Steve to the room to Steve and to the hall behind Steve's back - like he's looking for someone or something else he's not seeing - Steve knows it, and knows his first take was just about right. 

"Bucky," he says, and makes it a bit quieter. He tries not to wince when the sound of his name jerks Bucky's eyes, all his focus back to Steve, away from the small cat yowling at his feet. 

(She jumped up on the bed and then when that didn't make him pick her up, she jumped down and circled to the other side of him and now she's up on the dresser. Steve figures the fact that she's still _trying_ means it's not as bad as it could be. She tends to huddle up somewhere high when Bucky's completely gone. But it's been a while since she's complained this hard for this long, and it's starting to drill through his head.) 

"You know where you are?" Steve asks him. When it gets him a look that's half-wary and half-panic, Steve adds, "There's no wrong answer, Buck, just need to know." 

He expects _yes_ or _no_ \- or stuff that means more or less the same thing. Wrong answers, thinking he's somewhere he's not. It's always been like that before. 

But this time Bucky looks at him for a second, and then his gaze drops a little and goes unfocused; Steve watches him, watches the shadow of whatever the Hell you call it when confusion and half-choked panic and frustration tangle themselves into a knot - he watches that flicker over Bucky's face, before he shakes his head and looks at Steve again. 

"I don't know," he says, quiet. "I - this is - " He stops. This time when he looks at the wall instead of Steve it's mostly like he's just forgetting about what he's seeing in front of him, while he tries to dig coherent knowledge out of his head. "I came here. You . . .live here, but you can't - you're not, can't be, Steve, you - " 

Steve can see him working to keep hold of things, of thoughts, of now. And he can see the panic starting to win, and besides, most important, now he knows Bucky's got ahold of _enough_ that what Steve does next isn't going to (probably isn't going to) make anything explode. Will probably even help. Maybe. 

So he can take the couple steps over the space between them and reach out to catch Bucky's left shoulder. Carefully. 

(Realizes he didn't ask first, didn't ask to come into the room, only after he's most of the way through doing it. Damn it. He hopes it's okay. It's probably okay? He just needs - it can't be a habit. This time Bucky probably wouldn't've heard him, understood him, getting caught up in the confusion the way he is and Steve needs to keep that from happening, but that's just here and just now, he can't let it happen just because it's easier.) 

Bucky startles; his right hand's on Steve's forearm almost the second Steve touches his shoulder, but it's not blocking Steve or pushing him away. His fingers dig into Steve's skin and then ease enough to move without letting go, and Bucky's staring at that, where his hand's on Steve's arm. He's breathing too fast. Steve almost goes to touch his face and then thinks better of it, lets his free hand rest on Bucky's other shoulder instead. 

"Bucky," he says, ducking his head a little to try and catch Bucky's eyes, "hey, it's okay - you just got confused. You hit your head - " well, Steve's pretty sure he must've, and it'll do for now, " - rattled your brain, that's all. You're okay." 

Steve does really need the cat to shut up now. Bucky's hand moves, fingers resting against the front of Steve's shoulder instead of digging into his forearm, and then sliding from there to the chain around Steve's neck and tracing down to where it disappears under his shirt. After a second, Bucky pulls his hand back to touch the mirror spot on himself, where his shirt - the remains of his shirt - covers up the tags and the rest of the chain. 

_Now_ Steve raises his hand to rest against Bucky's neck. His fingers curve around the back of Bucky's skull, and Steve can feel the places there's dried blood and some other grit; his thumb rests in front of Bucky's ear. He can feel a shudder in Bucky's skin, too, until it's gone and some small layer of tension goes with it. Not much. But a little. 

"It's okay," Steve says. Bucky's not leaning into him, not exactly, but sometimes like this Steve can feel the way that _inside_ his own head, Bucky is, or would be. And he's actually pretty sure he's not making it up. So he's okay with letting his forehead rest against Bucky's - sees Bucky's eyes close before he's too close for that. Feels another thin layer of tension dissolve. 

"You hit your head, memory's messed up," Steve repeats. "It'll sort itself out." 

And then he kinda cracks, because he can't quite take it anymore. He lets go of Bucky and bends to catch the wailing kitten under her stomach and passes her over. 

"Okay," he says, as he does it. "I know it probably doesn't make sense, but I'm gonna need you to hold her for a sec so she shuts up. It'll make sense later. Promise." 

Bucky takes the cat, almost mechanically, but he settles her against the front of his shoulder the same way he always does - and then he looks at her for a second, like he's confused about why he's doing that. She rubs her head against his collar and under his chin and if Bucky looks totally bewildered, he doesn't look upset. 

He is a mess, though, so Steve's thoughts jump ahead two, three steps and, and he runs through a whole knot of concerns before he even knows it's there. 

And then comes back and tells him he doesn't want to be scrambling through the med-kit while Bucky's sitting there. That minimizing . . . _that_ , the presence of medical stuff, even just what counted (for them) as first aid as much as he can is a good idea. So - 

"Just hang on a sec?" Steve says. Some other part of his brain have been running a different kind of assessment, different considerations. And that part ends up figuring that honestly, the best idea is to let the cat calm down, and Bucky maybe process a little without the stress of Steve being right there. Because it is, kinda, in its own way - at least when he's like this it can't help being, because if Steve's here Bucky's got to watch him and watch himself, even if he doesn't know what he's doing or why. 

(Steve will never not hate that.) 

And Bucky nods, slowly, slightly, so Steve goes to pull the full kit out of the hall cupboard so he can dig out the handful of stuff he thinks he'll actually need and put them on one of the shelves in the bathroom by themselves. 

When he comes back, Bucky's still standing there. He's got the silly baby cat still held more or less mechanically against the front of his shoulder while she rubs her face into his shirt and makes little half-purr, half-chirp noises at him. He staring ahead, not blankly, but the way Steve knows means he's still desperately trying to figure out what in the name of God's going on, fill in all the memories he's misplaced and the knowledge he can't get ahold of. 

Steve's pretty sure that the faint unhappy lines at his forehead mean he still hasn't gotten much farther than knowing Steve, knowing himself (or at least that he has one), and knowing that there's a huge yawning pit of stuff he can't remember right now, in terms of the _story_ of his life. 

And meanwhile his body and his subconscious are absolutely dead certain they know all they need to - and they know he's in deep, deep shit without escape being an option. Except that Steve's already told him everything's fine. 

Steve figures at least by now, the last part does mean something. More than it used to. 

It's not the first time stuff's been this kind of mixed up, broadly speaking. The kind that comes with no apparent pattern to what's missing and what Bucky can remember, where it's just like someone threw everything in a bucket, shook it up, and then dug out handfuls - instead of Bucky just losing everything that's happened since a certain point, forgetting all of that. First time for being confused about whether or not he knows where he is, but not the rest. Not the first time it's been . . . just chaos. 

Not the first time, but it doesn't happen that much - three, maybe four times, there might be one Steve's kind of forgetting. They're all recent, and Steve's not sure if he should be thinking they're a good sign or if it's just a new option in the endless store of shit Bucky's brain seems to like throwing at him. The other times've all been waking up out of nightmares - and Steve supposes a relatively mild concussion could pretty much feel like the same kind of thing, same kind of confusion and mental disorder - except probably longer and harder to shake off. 

(He hopes it was mild. He's not sure what happens if it isn't.) 

Bucky looks back to Steve when Steve comes back in, pretty obviously waiting for Steve to give him some kind of sign about what happens next. 

Well. Hopefully this's been long enough to reassure the furball that - 

\- actually if you get right down to it Steve doesn't even really know what it is she needs reassurance of, exactly. Not that it doesn't make sense that she'd want some kind of it, he honestly gets that part on a kind of visceral level, but exactly what it is she thinks is going wrong . . . 

Everything Steve can think of, it all seems like it's too complex for a cat to understand, even a bright cat. 

Anyway, it doesn't matter: the point is, hopefully she'll just complain now, instead of wailing like something's trying to eat her alive. He can ignore the complaining, but there's something about the unhappy wailing that gets into the back of his head and digs and then hammers a spike into the hole. 

God only knows what it does to Bucky, even if he doesn't know what it is, or why. 

Carefully, Steve reaches out to take her out of Bucky's crooked arm. The sound she makes is almost a yowl, but it's her irritated yowl instead of the plaintive baby-kitten mewling. Bucky stares at him and then when she yowls he stares at her, as Steve lets her jump out of his curved arm down to the ground. 

"S'okay," he says, and Bucky looks up to him again, sharp, at the sound of his voice. "She's just griping now," he adds. "She was just worried. I guess. I mean, I still don't understand cats much." 

And God, he hates the lost look. Hates what it means, anyway, hates what he knows it means Bucky's _feeling_. Yes, there are other looks that are worse, but honest to Christ Steve would be okay with there not _being_ any kind of competition here anymore. All of them just never happening again. That would be fine with him. Just because it could be worse doesn't mean this isn't bad. 

"C'mon," he goes on, trying not to show it. "You're covered in blood and dirt and who knows what else, let's get some of it off." _And see where you're hurt,_ Steve doesn't add. There's at least a lot of skin torn off one knee and both the light grey cloth of the shirt and what Steve can see of Bucky's jeans are darkened red at his right hip. 

And that makes sense, Steve thinks, with the part of him that's always kind of detached and thinking. (Almost always, anyway.) That fits the image Steve can come up with, for the actual crash. He'd take the actual impact with his left arm, but not dead on like he's trying to stop the car in its tracks, he'd deflect the car to one side, redirect a lot of the force to where there's nobody for it to hurt. Except there'd probably still be enough force to send Bucky flying, and he'd probably hit the ground right hip, right shoulder and then over - 

There's probably more skin missing on his back, Steve thinks. 

Bucky's eyes flick towards the door, and then at Steve, and then at the room, and then at Steve again - and then at himself. And then he even lifts his right arm to look at the places where whatever was on the pavement ripped holes in his shirt, at the torn out knee of his jeans, and the blood, and the mud.

Steve's still not sure where Bucky went between the crash and now, because there wouldn't've been mud on the road, but - 

Bucky looks at it all like it's the first time he's noticed, and it probably is, but some part of what he sees is hitting _some_ knot of fear or anticipation - the bad kind - and it's enough that Steve takes a half step forward, catches Bucky's hand. 

Makes sure it's his _hand_ , not his wrist or his forearm. 

"Hey," he says. And there's the flinch, reflexive, but at the same time Bucky's hand closes on Steve's and that's just as automatic. It's reassuring, at least to Steve. Even if Bucky's still looking at him half sidelong. "Hey, it's fine, Buck," he says, while the silly furball twines herself around Bucky's legs. "It's fine. You're just a mess. We can handle mess. No big deal." 

There's a tension, Steve thinks, between how Bucky keeps a grip on his hand and the wary way he keeps the rest of his body back. And he thinks Bucky's going to answer at first but then there's one breath, two, and it's like the middle distance reaches out and sucks whatever Bucky was going to say, or ask, right out of his head. 

Steve's pretty sure he did hit his head. And wonders if sour, snide or teasing comments about doing that are gonna end up being less funny now, less comfortable, if it'll always drag his thoughts back to this. 

He really doesn't like this. 

"I don't," Bucky starts, and then cuts off short and sharp, like someone cut him off - and maybe in his head, someone did. But out here, Steve touches the side of Bucky's face with his free hand just to get him to look _at Steve._

"It's okay," he says, because it is. 

" . . .there was a car - " Bucky says, and then stops. Steve squeezes his hand. 

"Yeah," he agrees. "I know. You got hit by a car, you probably got a concussion, everything's mixed up right now. It happens. It'll get better." 

(And mentally Steve slams and wedges the door on even thinking about what happens if it doesn't, even contemplating that possibility - ) 

"But you gotta feel like shit," Steve goes on, "so c'mere. We can fix that. Some of it." 

 

Abrikoska does at least shut up, and jumps up into the bathroom sink, her new favourite place to supervise anything going on in the bathroom, even if she can't actually see any of it. Maybe it's got good air-currents, means she can smell what's going on in the room better: Steve doesn't know. The shutting up part is what matters, for now. 

He can't . . . quite say she's only a pain, right now: he kind of suspects that the sheer absurdity of the small, complaining cat is doing the same thing it mostly does, and kicking Bucky's subconscious away from falling into patterns that are miserable, and harder to escape, because a pet cat doesn't fit in them anywhere. 

But it's still better for her to be quiet and keep out of the way right now. 

In the brighter light of the bathroom, Bucky looks worse. Not that Steve couldn't see fine in the other room, but the bathroom lights are all the daylight-imitating lightbulbs and the brightness throws everything into sharp relief. Makes it easier to see those places where skin's been peeled away by asphalt or even by the friction of cloth pulling too hard and too fast. Makes them stand out, hit you in the face. 

Most of them aren't that deep, some are deeper and everything's like that, abrasions and gouges rather than cuts. They all still track with what Steve thinks makes sense, from being thrown backwards hard and hitting the pavement to roll after. Except the mud. 

"Do you remember where you went?" he asks, but after the second or two it seems to take for the words to make sense, Bucky shakes his head. 

Then he looks down, over to the side and through the bathtub, probably just because the tub happens to be there. "Was a yard," Bucky says, the words shifting to Russian and his voice soft and distant. "Or . . .building site? Construction machines. Needed to stop, wait for a while, nobody there. Then - I don't know." 

Probably because he keeled over for a while, finally, or maybe just got upset enough to make _that_ the point when he checked out, hit the end of what he could make sense of. And then he hid, at least until he could make enough sense of his own thoughts to know to come home. If he did either, keeled over or hid, and he was at some kind of machine-yard or junk-yard or construction site - that'd explain the mess. It's been long enough since it rained for there not to be much in the way of wet around most places, but the holes in construction sites, or yards full of storage, water and mud can hang on a lot longer. 

"It's fine," Steve says, following Bucky's change of language. "I just wondered; not a lot of mud around right now. It's fine." 

Except, Steve realizes, now he's stuck and he's not totally sure how to make _that_ fine. To keep things that way, keep them something Bucky'd believe is fine. 

He doesn't want to put Bucky in the shower, doesn't think it'd be a great idea. Him putting Bucky in there - it's not fucking hard to figure out what that'd evoke, even if Bucky's not sure of why. 

But on the other hand now that he's looking, the tub's just going to make for sitting in dirty water unless he empties it out right away and refills it, and he's got a gut-feeling by the end of the process Bucky'd be agitated again, or worse. Steve's not sure why, not entirely - something to do with the amount of trouble taken, or something - but at this point Steve's taken to trusting the gut instincts about that kind of thing and then figuring them out later. At least when the direction they're pointing him in is _don't do that it's a bad idea_. 

It takes him a minute to figure out a maybe-answer to that, something he's pretty sure never happened. He starts by pulling his t-shirt off; when he looks up into the slight shadow of new confusion on Bucky's face, Steve gestures to the shredded shirt he's wearing and says, "C'mere, let's get rid of that."

******

The mind backfills things. As you crawl out from under the wreckage and start to piece something back together that might look like coherent fucking thought (if you squint), the conscious mind skims through the reels of memory back as far as it can go and uses hindsight to piece shit together. It pieces shit together to tell you a story, and make you think you were aware of something, anything, long before you were.

Bucky's memory tries to tell him he started to come out of it - the stupor, the episode, psychosis, whatever the fuck you want to call it - sometime around the water first hitting his skin, the first physical stimulus he actually remembers for . . . a while. And okay, he does remember it when he doesn't really remember a lot before it, so it might be some kinda true - but it's not the one his brain tries to tell him it is. 

Just because the brain was making memories, doesn't mean you had any thoughts about what happened at the time. It's like noise fading in that you don't really notice until suddenly you're surrounded by music or babble or something: you didn't really notice it until now, you weren't really _here_ until now, but your memory backfills because it can and starts lying to you. 

Memory lies, Bucky thinks. And also water's wet. 

And he's in the water, or under it, standing in the vertical fall of tiny drops from the ceiling, hot water, the shower - he's standing in the shower. Still has clothes on - underclothes. Water's warm, and that's his _warm_ , most people's _too-hot_ , he's standing barefoot in the shower, under hot water, half-dressed with soaked cloth oddly heavy against his skin, and Steve's pushing Bucky's hair back from his face to make sure suds rinse back over his shoulders and not down into his eyes. 

Steve's half-dressed, too. And there used to be mud and half-dried blood on Bucky's skin, and there's, you can still see patches of what was there before on the cloth - mostly yellow-brown now, hot water cooking the proteins in to stain - but there isn't now. Isn't anything on his skin, just the faint sting that comes from using soap where you've scratched it open or taken it off. 

And with that thought the first thing he feels (hot water, and all the knowledge it brings with it, fading back and making him feel like he's been lucid way longer than he knows he has) gives way to the second, _drops_ away like a fucking wall tumbling over in an earthquake, so that the second thing he feels can take over everything. 

Just like the burning sting in his skin reminded the rest of his nerves they haven't made him fucking miserable in at least a couple hours now, (God, fuck, please let it not be more than a couple hours) now they _all_ come running back to tell him he fucking _hurts_ like he's been fucking beaten, the kind of beating that makes it feel like your bones are the things aching and it's every single fucking one. It fucking _hurts._

It doesn't even have the decency to drown out the sharp sting from his skin, either. Just sits there with it. Fucking stupid fucking nervous system _fuck_ he's sure it didn't used to matter this much - that yeah okay he hurt but he didn't _care_ , could ignore it. Even like this. Even this kind. 

And all of that, all of it to-fucking-gether - it's enough that the feeling of Steve's hands against his skull is too much, one thing too many and Bucky has to reach up and catch one wrist. Almost does it with his right hand and then half thinks and uses his left instead, for one less thing to feel. 

And it means he won't feel if Steve tenses, either, gets worried what Bucky stopping him means, before Bucky manages to say, "Stop. Just . . . a second. I can't - it's loud, too loud, bright. Stop." 

Steve stops. Steve always does. The thought wraps around Bucky's head like string around a wheel and stops being a thought, stops being . . . anything and Bucky forgets to let go of Steve's wrist while he stares at the corner where the wall meets the floor and tries to remember how to think. To make this make sense, to make any of it make sense, to _make sense_ \- 

"Why the fuck," he starts, but somehow the sentence gets away from him leaving only the word, the one word that was the point of the question, " - underwear?" and fuck, _fuck_ he hates that. How fucking hard is it to manage a God-damned sentence. 

Impossibly hard. Apparently. 

He still has hold of Steve's wrist. He looks at it, half his brain trying to tell him to let go and the other half . . . feeling almost like he's drunk, except without any of the fun, trying to figure out what the fuck it means. 

Steve solves it by turning his arm a bit. Bucky lets go like his skin's burnt (except there's no skin) but Steve's hand catches the back of his, fingers curving over his, skin against metal. 

"You were not happy about the idea of no clothes," Steve tells him, calmly. "I could tell. S'just a compromise." 

It . . .makes sense. It just makes sense in a way that grates across the inside of Bucky's head like a saw, like sandpaper. He wants to shove it away from him, get it out of his brain; fucking hates the idea of . . .that, of that kind of cringing twitchiness and God-fucking-damn-it if he's out of his mind enough for that _bullshit_ to start up, even _here,_ he's supposed to far enough out of his fucking mind for it not to matter. 

God _damn_ it. 

"Well that's fucking stupid," he says, self-consciousness making him harsh. He goes to strip off the sleeveless undershirt and gets halfway through before his entire left side lights itself on fucking fire in protest, from his collar and his sternum all the way to where he stops fucking _having_ nerves anymore and some of it even feels like it's flooding up into there even though it fucking _can't_. 

Steve's already moving, following his motion, reaching up to help him and saying, "Careful - " but it's too late. 

"Jesus _fucking_ Christ," Bucky hisses, right hand going to the scar as he lets Steve help and be the one to pull the shirt away and drop it on the tiles, as Bucky carefully lowers his left arm and the fucking screaming fire recedes into the ache, dull and overwhelming. 

"Yeah well you did kind of punch a speeding car in the face," Steve says, the repressed laughter carrying an edge that might be - 

That Bucky doesn't like. 

He checks himself, pressing his right hand into skin and muscle about an inch back from the seam between metal and meat, but nothing's broken, just fucking inflamed and angry, all the ligaments and fucking tendons - 

What Steve just said catches up with him. The words manage to twist into some kind of meaning, even if it's not the kind that makes any fucking sense. 

"Why the fuck would I do that?" he asks, the question falling out before he can think over whether he wants to ask it or even if he remembers or anyway if he _could_ remember if he tried because maybe . . .and now Steve's definitely trying not to laugh and the laughing is definitely half hysterics and what the fuck happened?

"I kinda think it was so it didn't kill the pedestrian it was gonna hit if you didn't," Steve says, mouth quirked wry. Bucky stares at him, right hand still digging fingers into the line of his scar, taking that in and he -

(He stands by a door, on a street. There's a woman not looking. There's a car coming too fast. Going to be a woman thrown broken-doll shape full of broken bones and torn tissue when the car hits her but he hits her. Shoves her out of the way. Shoves her back hard enough to knock her out of the way and off her feet. She shrieks. Falls. Rolls. Not faster than thought just simple thought easy thought fastest thought. Elements and factors easy to calculate: minor injuries to the woman; vehicle deflected, vehicle safety probably protecting driver; body - shock, minimal injury - ) 

"Fucking Hell," he hears himself breathe. It's like he's watching two different fucking movie screens at once, one of them the street and one of them the shower and neither of them real. 

( - and then reality not calculation: impact, direction, distance, impact and inertia and up on feet again. Self-assessment. Damage present; damage minimal. Disorientation - minimal. Overriding thought: _get out._ He - ) 

Steve's catching him, one arm under his left elbow, the other catching his right arm. Catching him, stepping him back half step until he can sit, of course, sit, stool in the shower always there's always been a stool in the shower this is the shower at home it has a stool the stool is for sitting on Steve guides him back to sit on the stool. 

_Fuck_. 

He hit his head. He'd known he would, it was part of what he knew outside the store when he started to move. Shoved the woman out of the way and turned to take the impact of the car with his left arm because if he didn't stop it then even with the woman out of the way the car would just jump the fucking curb and go through the people sitting on the bench but if he let it hit and then shoved it _there_ while it did - 

Car ended up . . .over there. Away from where it threw him. Where he hit the ground, where he hit his head. It did what he meant it to. He did what he meant to. Got up and left, got up to roofline and out of sight like he meant to but everything was . . .off. Thoughts kept skipping forward like a scratched record and he'd got confused and then he'd . . .lost it. 

Then there's not really much that makes sense. Until here and now. 

"Careful," Steve says, again. His hand's still cradling the back of Bucky's left hand. "You hit your head, some of what I was washing out was blood." 

There are some spreading points of faint red on what Steve's wearing, like blood spattered and then washing out in the water, except the water's too hot to wash out blood well so the faint patterns of yellow that are blood proteins after they cook show too and Jesus fucking Christ this is ridiculous. For both of them, but for him, for Steve more, and Bucky shakes his head. 

Then regrets it, when it makes him dizzy. Fuck, he hates concussions. He's pretty sure he always hated concussions, even when he couldn't've understood the concept of _hate_ if you'd explained it to him for ten minutes and drawn a fucking map. 

"I'm not about to fall over or pass out," he says. Without really thinking about it, he reaches up with his right hand to touch the side of his head that hurts, "and nothing's cracked or open now, so you can go - " 

"Yeah you know what," Steve interrupts, over top of him but neither as careful or as frustrated as Bucky expects - mostly almost amused and the kind Steve points at himself and what the fuck is that for? - "unless you don't want me here I don't need-to-go anywhere or anything." 

Bucky wants to kick him. Kick him hard in the shin and remind him that he's standing in a fucking shower in his soaking underwear after Bucky undoubtedly more or less stumbled home a filthy wreck, who knows _how_ badly (upsettingly, for Steve) confused and jumpy and all of that is fucking ridiculous and that's just the simple surface skim but he firstly he doesn't really have it in him to fight that losing argument and second - 

"Fuck you, Steve," he says, hears his own voice and its sullen frustration, "I never don't want you here." 

He wishes he hadn't said it, even before the words are finished. Wishes he weren't frustrated with it, angry about it, wishes he couldn't hear that _coming across_ because it's not at Steve, not really, even the part that's about Steve being a stupid self-sacrificing idiot is mostly about him, Bucky, taking advantage of it, needing it. Wanting it. Doesn't actually want it to change, just - 

"So don't be a stubborn fucking idiot about it," Steve says, only sounding exasperated. When Bucky glances up to give him a Look because even with his brains bashed out he's not gonna let _that_ one pass, Steve adds, "Yeah, _I_ just said don't be a stubborn fucking idiot, and as we are both well aware, I would _know_ from stubborn fucking idiots so I should know it when I damn well see it. So cut it out." The short glare he gives Bucky tosses the ball into his court. 

Bucky closes his eyes against the headache and leans back against the tiled wall and then feels his mouth twitch towards a grimace at the - it's not even quite pain, not loud enough with everything else, but the way pieces of his back suddenly light up somehow. "There's still fucking - " he starts, resigned. 

"Stuff in your back under the skin, yeah," Steve finishes for him. He half smiles. "I was trying to avoid having to dig it out while you were still twitching every time I moved, or until your head settled enough you figured getting it out was something you should do." 

Bucky looks over at the little knot of cotton that's the undershirt he pulled off, and this time sees where it's torn and shredded. And Bucky _wants_ to say _might as well do it now_. Wants to be able to actually open his fucking mouth and say it, but he can't: words choke themselves off in his throat, only thing he can do is turn away and wait. 

Leans the side of his head against the cooler tile instead. 

Most of the time he could do it himself but right now, the ligaments and muscle over the metal grafts on his ribs are screaming, and if he knows they're not broken he can feel the inflammation, too. Thinking over the direction of impact, honestly the only reason shit isn't dislocated is because none of it can, nothing working the way joints are supposed to work until too far away. But that doesn't mean the rest of his body has to like it. 

And truth told he could still handle this himself it's just he wouldn't be able to do it without showing that it hurts, and that winds Steve up. Right now he can't handle that, so right now he can't do shit that's going to hurt enough he has to show. 

Bucky's pretty sure he used to be better at hiding that. 

There's not as much gravel embedded in his skin as he'd been afraid there would be, and he's only starting to scrape against the hard edge of his ability to _let_ Steve do this before there's the faint sound of Steve putting tweezers down on one of the shower's little built-in shelves, and his hands on Bucky's shoulder and the top of his back smooth over skin instead of digging into it. 

The water stings, faintly: there's chunks of skin missing from his back as well as everywhere else. His head hurts more, but spins less, when he half-turns back to lean on the wall again. 

"Turn off the water," he says, sighing. "If I'm not gonna leak red spots over every fucking thing I touch for the next six hours I should probably paint everything with that Newskin shit the kid uses." 

 

Some of it gets painted with that shit; some of it, like the patch of missing skin on his hip, Steve insists on actually applying gauze to, and Bucky's too tired and light-headed to protest much. 

The idiot kitten's mad at him and clingy in turns. She whines and wraps herself around his legs with her tail up and vibrating for a bit, while Bucky sits on the bed and lets Steve fuss. When Bucky picks her up and puts her on his knee, she stays for a while without ever relaxing and then jumps down to stalk to the door and tell him off. Then she more or less does the same fucking thing all over again. 

One time she's so busy lecturing him that she walks into the wall, and then complains at the wall. 

It's at least four rounds of that bullshit before she comes back to give it up and settle; by then Steve's looking at the place where gravel tore skin off the back of Bucky's neck and up into his scalp. 

Something's itching at the back of his head - metaphorically, not literally, literally everything's settled into the dull hot ache in his connective tissues and he could give two shits for the skin-level sting he doesn't even notice anymore - but his thoughts are too messed up for Bucky to get ahold of it. 

"For the record," Steve says, absently, as his fingers comb carefully through Bucky's hair at the nape of his neck to look there, "I think punching out a car seriously ups your score on the list of dangerously reckless stunts." 

The comment manages to drag Bucky's mind out of the syrupy mud it was stuck in. That's probably what Steve meant it to do, but after a second of making sure Steve said what Bucky thought he did, Bucky snorts. 

"Exploding fucking tanks," he says, shortly. And then, before Steve can protest that war calls for extreme measures - which is the most specious fucking argument he could possibly come up with, but he tries it out every time anyway - Bucky adds, "Jumping out of fucking aircraft without a fucking parachute." 

After a second that is patently and obviously stuffed full of Steve trying to find an answer that doesn't sound ever so slightly like he's whining, Bucky adds, "Yeah, Romanova told on you." 

"That happens a lot," Steve replies, somewhere between sheepish and aggrieved and also finishing with taping this square of gauze on where he insists is too deep a gouge for just the sealant. When he's done, Bucky lets Steve help get one of the open-necked shirts on over his head, gets his right arm through the sleeve first and then tries not to wince at moving the left enough to get it through its sleeve. 

He doesn't say, _Of course it does, she's still constantly trying to prove she's looking out for your best interests_ , because a) he doesn't want to talk about it, and b) that kind of cynical, complicated shit still makes Steve uncomfortable, and probably always will. 

Not that Bucky thinks she's lying. Well. Not that he consciously thinks she is, with . . .most of him. But it's also not like she doesn't fucking know how that shit works. That's why she's still trying. 

"Eight hour plus transit," Bucky says, instead, "full support, fully supplied, you have no fucking excuse." 

"It was a miserable week and she was nagging me about going out with someone from Records," Steve protests, in total defiance of what Bucky just said. 

"That's not why you fucking did it," Bucky informs him, and maybe this one comes out a touch sour. "You did it because you wanted to see if you fucking could, because you didn't even _know_. You wanted to find out what would fucking happen." He considers reaching over to flick Steve's ear, but his side hurts enough so that the fun would be lost to the ache. 

Steve's standing up, balling up the garbage and tossing it at the little waste-basket by the door and trying his best to go for wounded dignity. It's not something he's good at, especially not when he's fending off sheepishness while he's at it. Usually by the time Steve could actually end up with wounded dignity, he's already pissed off and is trying on just plain morally-injured-and-insulted, if not all the way to righteously-furious. 

"You're the one who just got hit by a car," he says, "why is this turning into - " 

Bucky's already snorted again. "You think I don't know exactly what happens when I get hit by a car, Steve? This is not the first fucking time." 

Then he's torn between wishing he hadn't said it, wishing with a kind of flinching guilt . . . and then just fucking dissolving into a black and kinda nasty laughter at the sudden struggle written all over Steve's face. It's not to let the badly faked wounded dignity dissolve into distress and dismay. And he's not winning, and that's probably not really funny. 

There's maybe a couple twisted heartbeats before Steve does manage to scramble his expression back to more like before and says, "Okay, but none of this actually has any bearing on how it _still_ ups your score," somewhere between mock and genuine stubborn. 

Bucky shakes his head, but barely, because his neck aches too. "Sure," he retorts. "You've still got a lead nobody could even get close to, so who cares?" 

The idiot kitten decides that since Steve's not messing around at Bucky's shoulders anymore, she wants to be on them; when the pressure of her paws against the join for his left shoulder radiates a more intense ache down the whole seam, Bucky fends her off and settles her on his bent left arm instead, because it doesn't hurt more to hold it that way and most of the time she'll take it as second best. 

"Tony tested all his prototypes on himself, blew himself into a concrete ceiling and gave himself a concussion, and then illegally intervened in an international war-zone the next day," Steve parries, although seriously, Bucky thinks, that is not the path he wants to go down. He should actually know better. 

"Congratulations," Bucky says, dryly, and puts the kitten down when she decides that if she can't be a scarf she wants to do something else. "You're like twins." 

" . . .how about never saying that again," Steve says, with a look of affronted dismay that's probably only half exaggerated. 

"You started it," Bucky points out and Steve tries for dignity again. Didn't work last time, but when has Steve ever let persistent failure stop him?

"Yeah, sure," is what Steve says, "okay, I'm going to make coffee, you coming?"

******

Steve holds the coffee hostage, briefly, until after Bucky eats an avocado, or at least most of it. Actually, he held it hostage (and he was joking) over Bucky eating something over two hundred calories - the avocado was just what Bucky grabbed.

After sort of . . . fading back in, in the shower, Bucky seems okay-ish. There's still a glaze to his eyes every time there isn't something to pay attention to right now, he's still way more jumpy, and Steve wouldn't bet a nickel that the equilibrium's not as fragile as thin bone china, but he's okay. Ish.

Bucky chucks the pit at Steve from where he's sitting on one of the tall chairs on the other side of the counter, and Steve catches it. "You know, you can apparently germinate these," Steve says, cheerfully, and Bucky rolls his eyes. 

Just for that, Steve digs out the toothpicks and the last mug to get a serious chip in it (the front reads _I'm not antisocial, I just don't like you_ ), fills it up with water, finds the top and bottom of the pit, sticks four toothpicks into the pit and balances it so half of it's in the mug of water. 

Which, according to the internet, is how you sprout the things. 

Bucky looks upward for patience, and Steve kinda underlines his assessment: yeah, Bucky seems better, but still off, It's like the motions of normal (at least, their current normal) are easier to go through than earlier, maybe, but it's still mostly motions right now and Steve can tell the difference. He figures that's okay though, considering where things were as little as an hour ago. Expected, even. 

So he's not going to worry about it. 

Steve's passing over Bucky's refilled-mug and meaning to turn back and fill his own when Bucky catches his forearm with his left hand, and maybe Steve _will_ worry about the sudden, focused look of unhappy, wary attention. 

Or the way Bucky drops Steve's arm and yanks his own hand back, after Steve looks at him. Or maybe how quiet he is when he speaks. Or all three. 

"I didn't tell you what happened," Bucky says, like he just realized that. There's the wall behind his eyes that says whatever answer he's looking for he expects it to hurt. "I didn't even fucking remember. How did you know?" 

Damn. Steve'd been kind of hoping . . .well honestly he doesn't even know what he thought he'd been hoping. That it wouldn't come up, maybe, but that was stupid, because Bucky isn't. Maybe that it wouldn't come up _yet_ , while the hangover from everything else is still right here and raw, concussion still probably a factor; maybe that Bucky would jump right to the answer on his own and it'd be okay and "it", the answer, wouldn't really matter. 

Steve opens his mouth to answer and then stops. Abrikoska jumps up on the counter and meows, probably a useful distraction for the second and a half it takes for Steve to see the humour of what's about to happen and to drag one hand over his face. Bucky fends off the cat with his left hand by way of gently pushing her down on the counter and rubbing his fingers over her tummy until she rolls on her back. He doesn't look away from Steve, who sighs. 

God he hopes this _does_ let Bucky wind back down. 

"Okay," Steve says. "The thing is, I'm gonna need you to listen to the whole thing before you react, okay? And yeah, you'll see why that's funny in a minute." 

It's a bit . . . reimagined, granted, taking into account how some things are impossible. Steve's not going to try to touch getting upset or panicking or anything else, but reacting, maybe. And more important, because Steve's said it, he's already pointed out there's something at the end to make it better than it's going to sound to start with. 

Bucky nods, slightly; Steve's not sure he believes it, but he does believe Buckly'll try. Which is all he can ask. More than he should, maybe. But he has to. 

"Okay," Steve repeats. He carefully takes a breath. "About ten minutes before you got home, I got an email from Matías, the PR guy from the Tower." He waits a second to see if Bucky's showing any kind of recognition, but he might as well not have; the only thing Bucky's really showing is the blank apprehension.

Steve goes on, "And it said I was supposed to read the whole thing before I panicked, which is the funny part. Anyway," and Steve can feel himself tense a little, waiting for what's kind of unavoidably about to come, "it had a short article about a lady driving drunk who crashed her car and a lady at the scene claiming she would've been hit if someone hadn't pushed out of the way - " 

It's not something most people would see, but Steve recognizes the way Bucky goes still, expression not so much frozen as suspended. He leans over the table and puts his hand over Bucky's right hand. 

"Hey," he says. "Whole thing, remember?" 

He'd feel better if Bucky would look at him - more sure that Bucky's listening, _can_ still listen and isn't gone, but that's not happening so he has to go on without it. 

"And the whole thing," Steve says, keeping everything as calm as he can, "the lady in the car was fine, the other lady was fine, nobody saw anything except someone who was so drunk she's already been arrested and someone else who'd just had a brush with death, no cameras, no nothing else. Okay? It's nothing." 

Steve carefully tightens his grip on Bucky's hand for just a second. "You kept at least one person safe and the only thing there is to worry about," he goes on, as Bucky finally, slowly meets his eyes, "is you got messed up and got a concussion doing it, and that's messing up other stuff. That's all. It's fine. That's all that happened." 

Bucky's left hand's been resting on the kitten's side, not moving, and now she twists over and mews a complaint. Whatever it is she wants, it doesn't get it for her; Bucky pulls his hand back from her, and his right hand back from Steve, and puts both on the mug. Stares at the surface of the coffee for what feels like a really long time.

"And if it wasn't?" he asks, finally, his voice quiet and harsh. 

"You'd still've saved that lady," Steve replies, trying to keep his voice level and definite and - right now, at least - to make himself shake off any reluctance about saying it based more or less entirely on not only all the scrapes and bruises he can still see, but the worse ones he knows are mostly hidden, and no he doesn't really care that they'll probably be gone in a couple days. The point is, it's not about what Bucky'll probably think it's about if he can hear it. "It'd still be worth it. And we'd make it fine." 

Bucky doesn't answer. Looks through the upper cabinets to Steve's left side instead. In annoyance, the kitten makes a couple of weird noises and then stalks over to butt her head against Bucky's collar. She purrs in a way that's almost a demand, more than a sign of being pleased. 

Without really acknowledging her otherwise, Bucky gently pushes her away, one handed. 

Steve steps around the counter and drags the other tall chair closer to Bucky's. He turns it around, so he's sitting with the top of the low back against his ribcage, leaning his arms on it. He's started to do that, because he'd started to notice a tension he's not even sure Bucky knows is there if he sat beside Bucky on anything but, say, armchair type chairs to talk to him. At least if he sat normally. Turn the chair around and that goes away. Nothing to worry about. 

Not only does Steve not really know why, he doesn't really _want_ to, not when it's so easy to fix. 

"Bucky," he says. "You did good. It's okay. It's more than okay." He hesitates, but then decides it's more likely to break the mood than anything else (and he doesn't like this mood), so Steve adds, "Just maybe next time skip the concussion and, you know, being thrown twenty feet through the air because a car hits you." 

It cracks the mood, anyway, so that Bucky makes a noise like a strangled weak laugh and covers his face with his right hand instead of staring through the counter. And that's something. 

So Steve adds, "Or, I dunno, wear a helmet or something," and it gets another choked-laugh noise before Bucky sits back in his chair. 

"Fuck you, Steve," he says, sounding tired but not quite hollow. He takes his coffee in his right hand and swallows some. Steve leaves the bad pun alone for now. 

"How much of you's sore?" he asks instead. "If you're being honest." 

"Jesus, everything hurts even if I'm not being honest," Bucky retorts, but because he knows what Steve means, he adds, "Head's not anywhere fucking near as bad as this," and he makes a vague gesture at the seam for his left arm. 

"Feel sick?" Steve asks; Bucky huffs out maybe a quarter of a humourless laugh. 

"No, for fucking once," he says. "Told you I just needed to bash my fucking brains out." 

"Hah hah," Steve says, dryly, and then goes on, "then you should come rest. Sleep if you can." 

Bucky frowns at him. "I thought you were supposed to stop people from sleeping if they hit their head." 

"Nah," says Steve. "That's out of date." He acknowledges the look Bucky gives him with a quick half smile and then finishes, "Just supposed to take them to the hospital if you _can't_ wake them up. Otherwise you're supposed to rest." 

After a minute of a kind of quiet blankness that's less arguing with himself, Steve thinks, and more waiting to see if any argument's going to show up before he agrees, Bucky says, "Yeah, sure. Why not." 

 

Steve digs out a couple of the cold packs and also pulls out the electric blanket he picked up about a month ago. Neither of them really trusts it enough to use it a lot, or maybe better to say use it casually. But heat spread all over it doesn't set off tripwires in Bucky's head quite as much as heating pads or the barley bag kind of heat does, and it offsets any possible chill from the cold-packs that'll hopefully manage to do something to reduce the inflammation they're both pretty sure is what's making Bucky's left side hurt quite so much. 

Turns out the way Bucky's side currently hurts least is lying on his front with pillows under his right hip and his torso resting mostly on a pillow with one of the smaller, denser pillows running across the left side of his chest, on top of Steve's legs. And Bucky tries like three different ways to make something else work for that last part but it turns out they don't have any pillows that exactly mimic how someone's lap props two other pillows, because oddly people don't make pillows the same consistency as the human thigh. 

Steve wasn't going to push on this one, honestly. Bucky's got plenty of reasons to be twitchy, averse to . . .well basically anything. And he's already had to do too much work in the way of dragging his head back to sanity tonight, and Steve does actually know when discretion is the better part, and all of that. 

Except after watching Bucky shift three times and being pretty _sure_ it would make the difference, his resolve cracks and he half-coaxes, half-nags Bucky into giving up and trying even if it does mean, yeah, okay, Steve's being subject to the terrible imposition of being a pillow. And Steve's right: his knee _does_ keep the small pillow where it apparently needs to be to stop something in what's left of the muscles and ligaments and tendons on the left side of Bucky's chest to shut up about everything being too hard. 

Steve'd be lying if he said the way that brings Bucky in arms' reach - more than - so Steve can touch him without thinking that much didn't make him happy about it, though. 

They're about halfway through West Side Story and Steve's almost starting to wonder if Bucky's falling asleep when Bucky says, "I'm sorry," quiet and simple and a lot of other things that mean Steve has to keep a lid on a sudden surge of temper at the part where Bucky thinks he needs to say it. 

"You have _nothing_ to be sorry for," he says, and if he can't let it be heated, he can and does let it be as absolute and emphatic as he wants it to be, bar raising his voice. 

Bucky's replies, "Steve, don't even fucking try to tell me I didn't scare the everloving shit out of you today." And there's no heat to what he says, either, even in the curses. Just tired. Steve lets his hand rest against the centre of Bucky's upper back. 

"Yeah, okay," he says, this time as dry as he can make it, "so now we're God-knows-how-many to one instead of God-knows-how-many to zero. Much like the other list, I think I'm pretty solid in my lead on that one, Buck. And if you argue too much," he adds, "I'll just get suspicious this is reverse psychology to make me admit it." 

"Bullshit, Steve," Bucky says, but at least this time the tone has the note that's somewhere between exasperated and fond that means _arguing with you is like shouting at a wall so I'm not gonna bother._

Something occurs to Steve as he's looking for the right kind of response, fingers tracing patterns between Bucky's right shoulder-blade, the top of his spine, his scar and back again. It makes his mouth curve into a half-smile before he's even finished thinking it, and with just a second's pause to make sure it's not a terrible idea, he counters, "Besides, now the next time you try and convince me you're the worst person in the world I can point out you got hit by a car for some lady you don't even know. You can't tell me that doesn't count." 

Bucky actually pauses for a second before he says, "The woman was only going around 40mph, I knew if I didn't fuck it up I wouldn't even break anything important." 

Steve combs his fingers through Bucky's hair and repeats, deliberately, "You got hit by a car for some lady you don't even know. You got a concussion and a soft-tissue injury. These are facts, Bucky, you can't argue with them." 

"You're fucking ridiculous," is all Bucky says, which is the argument equivalent of retreating to the fortifications and barring the doors. 

The kitten, who'd wandered off to visit the kibble bowl and the catbox, comes back and demands to be let under the blanket beside Bucky's ribcage. Once she's settled, and Bucky's settled again, Steve goes back to tracing his fingers idly over the top of Bucky's shoulder, and his neck and his jaw, temple and cheekbone and the shell of his ear, and over again. 

He gets a text, fishes his phone out with his other hand. The message from Clint reads _assuming from lack of frantic etc that despite getting hit by actual speeding automobile for daring rescue jas. safely home._

Steve wonders what the other options are that mean Clint would bother texting to ask, but he supposes they could both be dead. He sends back, _other than leaving skin on pavement yes._

_good_ , Clint says. _tasha would like to relate that yr both fucking hopeless. must now return to jane austen adaptation marathon. pray for me._

Which at least explained the slightly odd style to the texts. Mostly, anyway. The rest can probably be blamed on tequila. 

Around the time Riff gets himself stabbed like an idiot, Steve's pretty sure Bucky's asleep. By the end of the movie, or at least by the time Steve's actually falling asleep, Steve'll have to wake him up to get him to go to bed instead, because he'll beat himself up if he thinks he's made Steve sleep out here, sitting up. But there's two more murders and a finale before that. 

It can wait.


End file.
